With the meteoric growth of the Internet in recent years, there has been an associated rise in many if not all current aspects as well as development of many new uses for this ubiquitous communication tool. One such area that has witnessed substantial growth over the years is the field of e-commerce. Businesses as well individuals are constantly creating new ways to buy and sell products and/or services over the Internet as well as new ways to implement their ideas. Broadly, most conventional solutions fall into at least one of three categories: Business-to-Business (B2B), Business-to-Consumer (B2C), and most recently, Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C).
In the C2C area, there are many commercial platforms available intended to provide an online marketplace for the buying and selling of goods. Some websites offer a centralized location for marketing and searching for items, while others include mechanisms to aid in the buying and selling. One such mechanism that is widely popular is the “auction” mechanism. Conventional auction systems (e.g., auction web pages, websites . . . ), however, place a lot of obligation on their buyers and a high level of insecurity on their sellers.
For example, in a conventional online auction marketplace a buyer has a concrete obligation to buy any item (e.g., a car) for which she is the winning bidder. Therefore, the prudent buyer will only bid on one car at a time, even though she might be interested many cars currently for sale on the online forum. In the very least, she may prefer to be the leading bidder for only one car, even though she may have other bids for other cars outstanding. Thus, those other bids, by necessity of her obligation to buy winning bids, will not be very meaningful, or even if they are, she is exposed to the risk that she will win both (or all) cars, even though she only wants (and more particularly can only afford) a single car. Moreover, in order to fairly run the online auction, buyers generally are not allowed (or at least discouraged) to withdraw their bids once made. Otherwise, sellers would not be interested in listing their items on that auction. Due to these and other difficulties, an online auction is not conducive to negotiating deals with more than one party at a time.
In addition, conventional online auction forums create an environment in which there is a lot of insecurity for the sellers. For example, a seller of an item (e.g., a car) wants, ideally, to sell his car at the maximum possible price such as a desirable or “dream” price. However, the auction mechanism typically requires the seller to enter a reserve price corresponding to the lowest possible price the seller is willing to accept for the car. As with the buyer side, the seller also is generally forbidden (or at least discouraged) from withdrawing an offer for sale once it is posted. Thus, the seller must enter this reserve price for which he might be very insecure because his car could very well sell for that price no matter how much he hopes otherwise. However, if the seller makes the reserve price too high (e.g., at or near his dream price), the end result is that buyers will often not make any bids, undermining certain positive effects of the auction mechanism, and the seller may therefore have a much lower chance of selling the car.